Quantum sensors can be used in medical technologies, navigation systems, and more, but they’re too expensive for most people. That’s where the Uncut Gem open source project comes in.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 172
NASA and Google are building an AI medical assistant to keep Mars-bound astronauts healthy
That looming reality is pushing NASA to gradually make on-orbit medical care more “Earth-independent.” One early experiment is a proof-of-concept AI medical assistant the agency is building with Google. The tool, called Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), is designed to help astronauts diagnose and treat symptoms when no doctor is available or communications to Earth are blacked out.
The multimodal tool, which includes speech, text, and images, runs inside Google Cloud’s Vertex AI environment.
The project is operating under a fixed-price Google Public Sector subscription agreement, which includes the cost for cloud services, the application development infrastructure, and model training, David Cruley, customer engineer at Google’s Public Sector business unit, told TechCrunch. NASA owns the source code to the app and has helped fine-tune the models. The Google Vertex AI platform provides access to models from Google and other third parties.
Sweet disguise: Body hides its own RNA from the immune system with sugar
To our immune system, naked RNA is a sign of a viral or bacterial invasion and must be attacked. But our own cells also have RNA. To ward off trouble, our cells clothe their RNA in sugars, Vijay Rathinam and colleagues at the UConn School of Medicine and Ryan Flynn at Boston Children’s Hospital report in Nature.
Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a family of large biological molecules fundamental to all forms of life, including viruses, bacteria, and animals. Viruses as diverse as measles, influenza, SARS-CoV-2, and rabies all have RNA, which is why the immune system starts attacking when it sees RNA in the bloodstream or in other inappropriate locations. But our own cells have RNA as well, sometimes displaying it on their surface, plain for roaming immune cells to see—and yet the immune system ignores it.
“Recognizing RNA as a sign of infection is problematic, as every single cell in our body has RNA,” says UConn School of Medicine immunologist Vijay Rathinam. The question is, how does our immune system distinguish our own RNA from that of dangerous invaders?
“SuperAgers” Show Cognitive Decline Is Not an Inevitable Part of Aging
For 25 years, scientists at Northwestern Medicine have been studying people aged 80 years and older – dubbed “SuperAgers” – to uncover what makes them stand out.
In a new study, researchers show that these individuals display memory performance comparable to those at least 30 years younger, defying the long-held belief that cognitive decline is an unavoidable part of aging.
The study was published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia.
New “evolution engine” creates super-proteins 100,000x faster
Researchers at Scripps have created T7-ORACLE, a powerful new tool that speeds up evolution, allowing scientists to design and improve proteins thousands of times faster than nature. Using engineered bacteria and a modified viral replication system, this method can create new protein versions in days instead of months. In tests, it quickly produced enzymes that could survive extreme doses of antibiotics, showing how it could help develop better medicines, cancer treatments, and other breakthroughs far more quickly than ever before.
